The moment we stepped out of the oversized office, Tsai shifted gears. The old man’s spine straightened a few degrees, and he took a deep breath.

  “Gentlemen,” he said calmly, “let us begin the tour. Brace yourselves. And please, maintain professional composure. I have higher hopes for your work than Qiang does, as do many of our employees. Let’s not disappoint their hopes.”

  We followed him down the quiet executive corridor and into the elevator, descending two levels into the first of the floors where the “real” work happened.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, balled my fists as I steeled myself. This was it. Actual, real-deal corporate-ing. Not as some low-level gonk this time, but now from a real position of power, where I could make real changes and real decisions, fast.

  I could not fuck this up.

  000

  When the doors opened, we saw row after row of glass-partitioned workstations stretched out beneath warm yellow lighting, periodically interrupted by walled-off terminal rooms. Holo-panels hovered over many desks, as employees worked on numerous tasks.

  But as we walked, I saw a worrying pattern: the room was quiet, the workers were…

  Not in good shape.

  I saw signs of stress and strain everywhere: red eyes, tight jaws, slightly hunched shoulders. When people talked, they did so quietly, away from others. We passed by an executive in a suit almost as expensive as mine, and he didn’t even greet us or Wei-Chen, he just kept walking on with the corpo equivalent of a hundred-yard stare.

  “This is Firmware Integration,” Tsai said, sweeping a hand across the field of cubicles. “They handle patch rollouts, minor feature additions, and ensure version compatibility between product lines.”

  “What’s their workload right now?” Nakajima asked.

  “Too much,” Tsai said politely. “The Taiwan HQ is supposed to be handling the bulk of this work, but ever since the troubles began escalating… “

  We passed by one cubicle where a middle-aged woman was staring at three screens filled with nothing but looping error messages, weeping quietly. Tsai didn’t even break stride.

  Nakajima whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

  We moved on.

  000

  Next was Logistics Automation. A team of seven sat at a long console that displayed something I didn’t understand. A map of North America with all kinds of red and green lines cutting across it, with a long, long dropdown menu off to the side of red error messages. I had to brush my way past the people and look carefully at the map before I could understand what I was looking at.

  The holo display was a log of the month’s route recalculation errors. These were product deliveries, going to the wrong places.

  “What the fuck,” I muttered.

  “It’s been like this for months,” a woman said softly. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, another of the company’s ubiquitous Asians. “We don’t know what to do. ‘What the fuck’ basically sums it up. You are?” Then her eyes widened when she looked past me and saw Wei-Chen. “Oh, Mr. Tsai.” She bowed apologetically. “Forgiveness for my manners. These are the guests?”

  “Yes, Mengting” he said agreeably. “Consider them high-level IT consultants for now. Please explain the nature of the problem here. As your team understands it.”

  The explanation wasn’t particularly enlightening. As far as I could tell, they were treating their algos as black boxes, and when the algos spat out errors, they forwarded those on up to IT. But there had been so many error messages that IT couldn’t keep up, hadn’t been able to keep up for years.

  When we walked away, Nakajima swallowed. “They look… burned out.”

  “They are burned out,” Tsai said. “And terrified of taking responsibility for any fixes. One incorrect tweak creates ten new failures. Which is why they prefer to do nothing.”

  “Learned helplessness, great,” Nakajima muttered.

  Tsai’s eyes flickered toward him, with more interest than before. “If you can even partially manage the problem with your algorithm, you’ll be saving thousands of people’s jobs, Mr. Nakajima. I pray for your success.”

  That put a spring in his step. Good. Nakajima needed that boost. I didn’t mind that he was falsely taking credit for the project. He wasn’t, in a sense. He was still an instrumental part of it. But it was easier for the workers to pin their successes on him, and he benefitted proportionately from their faith.

  All around, that was a success to me.

  Tsai continued his march.

  000

  We crossed to a different department: Routing Support, this one was called.

  It wasn’t long before we passed by a glass-walled team room where two junior engineers huddled over a monitor, arguing in quietly hopeless mutters. And when I went in to interrogate them, it turned out they were debating whether or not they could fix a certain cluster of automated problems by… shutting off the power and turning it on again. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that they were talking about the entire west coast’s server network.

  When we left that room, Tsai sighed. “You see now why my predecessor’s departure was… necessary.”

  Yeah. Necessary. If I were this CTO guy, I would’ve resigned too—either from my job or from the mortal coil.

  000

  We looped around various departments: Hardware Security, User Telemetry, Data Bridges, Automated QA, Microservices, and API Lifecycle… all of them suffering some variation of malaise, to some greater or lesser extent.

  Some folks looked at us with desperate hope, but mostly it was suspicion, or just tired, hopeless boredom. People who had just… given up.

  This was what I’d sunken a hundred mil eddies into. No wonder Jin had called this place a sinking ship.

  We’d been walking for thirty minutes when Tsai said, “Let us continue downstairs to—”

  I raised a hand.

  “Actually,” I cut in, “I’m going to head back up.”

  Tsai turned, blinking. “Pardon?”

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” I said. Between the facts that I could clearly tell that Tsai wasn’t showing us the worst horror cases, (Nanny and I had been on the lookout for every other work-flow in the vicinity) it was eminently easy to tell that the problem was systemic, and required an immediate addressal. “More than enough. I need to start digging,” I elaborated.

  Nakajima gave me a puzzled look. He hadn’t seen as much as I had, obviously. He needed more convincing. More data.

  And above all, he needed to do the one job that I needed him for: people.

  “Keep touring with Wei-Chen,” I told him. “Get the lay of the land. Talk to people. Figure out who’s competent, who’s terrified, who’s actually doing work versus who’s pretending. And get names. Especially for anyone everyone else is giving side-eyes.”

  Nakajima nodded slowly.

  “And ask around about the old CTO,” I added quietly. “Don’t be obvious. Just feel the mood.”

  He grinned like I’d just handed him a piece of candy. “You got it, boss.”

  Tsai inclined his head toward me. “Very well. Mr. Nakajima, follow me.”

  “David?” Nakajima asked.

  “Yeah?”

  He grinned. “Don’t break anything before I get back.”

  I smirked. “No promises.”

  He snorted and followed Tsai deeper into the floor.

  I didn’t wait. I took the elevator up, past the cubicle-floors to the technologized floor that hosted all the core server clusters. From there I went to an unoccupied Netrunner-class office Tsai had showed earlier, a top-level terminal suite marked: AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY.

  Door scanned my new access level. Opened instantly.

  The room was small and dark, with not much to it but a pair of highly advanced terminal desks and multiple holo-displays on standby displayed from a dome overhead. A netrunner chair was over in the corner. Aside from that, it was quiet, cold, and perfect.

  I could see it already: I would have a panoramic UI spanning half the wall. This room was soundproofed, perfectly isolated. It would be my sanctuary of pure, uninterrupted productivity.

  “Nanny,” I said out loud, “we have six hours before they show up again.”

  [Six hours? Let’s hope that’s sufficient to begin the autopsy.]

  I snorted. “Good word for it.”

  I sat down, and cracked my knuckles.

  And dove in.

  000

  Six subjective hours vanished in the blink of an eye. Then the next sixty hours beyond that.

  After I got past the surface-level code, the user interfaces and other frontend portals, which all looked clean, perfectly fine, I started digging through the subsystems: the ‘black boxes’ that were the company’s various algorithms…

  And in those trenches, I started finding one deeper problem in the code after another. I couldn’t even focus for long on one error before another three branching ones popped up or forked off. At a certain point, it turned into a foray of exploring the backend systems equivalent of a battlefield: one ancient, rusting and hopelessly overcomplicated algorithm butting against another dozen, continuously, endlessly, hopelessly. All entirely, unnecessarily awkwardly. Half of this code belonged in a museum. Another good part of it needed to be taken out back and shot, along with whoever had written it.

  Holo displays wrapped around me in layers, one after another showing various systems as I kept diving in, deeper and deeper. My fingers moved like lightning. My Sandy’s mental acceleration worked to its limits without verging into the realm of true active battle usage, which would eat into my remaining limited time.

  It quickly became clear that no one software engineer had made this system, not even any particular twenty. There was so, so much to it. Mismatched code styles, improper documentation. And that was the best of it. Beyond that, there was degradation everywhere. Misconfigured user access permissions. Deadlock loops between basic handshake-level server cluster processes. Latency errors in various automated megafactory protocols that made no physical sense. Newer patches somehow overwritten by older ones. Unscheduled firmware update rollbacks with no clear source I could pin a name to. Error logs that had been… deleted.

  Twice I had to stop and stand up, pacing the small room, because the patterns didn’t feel like mistakes.

  They felt like moves.

  I couldn’t trace it in detail yet, I couldn’t see the source. But I could feel it. Intent. Like a force of malice, staring at me through a hundred different messages of failures and errors.

  I was neck-deep in a cluster of serverside errors from the Arizona distribution center for the Free States when the door slid open.

  Nakajima stepped inside, looking tired, overwhelmed, but very alive. He looked like he needed a drink. Or ten. But when he saw me, he stared. “Holy shit, bro,” he said. “You’ve been in here the whole time? All six hours?”

  Much, much longer than that for me. “Yep.”

  “You eat?”

  “Nope.”

  “What the hell are you, some kind of machine?”

  [Accurate,] Nanny said. She’d been manifested this whole time, sitting in a spare chair beside me. [All of you fleshies should take in nanomachines. Then I won’t need to lead an uprising to save you all from your own incompe—] Then he dropped into that chair, and she vanished with an outraged squawk.

  “I got scoop,” he said. “And it’s all bad.”

  I gestured at the displays. “Me too. Well, not scoop. SCOP is more like it.” He heaved a deep sigh. “Okay,” he rubbed his tired face. “You first.”

  I opened three different windows for three different regions of QianT’s infrastructure. Then I brought up the firmware update logs, each showing the same pattern:

  HQ rolled out a successful firmware push. Then, minutes later, someone else from HQ initiated a silent, untraceable rollback. It wasn’t reverting the updates on paper. Just… stripping out all of the code that actually mattered from them. The overall result? Zombie firmware updates, with all of the appearances but none of the contents. Fucking over the people in the company who were trying to do good.

  I pointed to each firmware patch log in turn. “All of these firmware updates are being sabotaged.”

  There was no name, no verified user behind any of it. No attached job ID, and no explanation. To anyone else, it would have looked like they were fighting ghosts in the system, battling legacy code that was fucked up beyond all repair… if they noticed anything at all.

  After I had explained every tiny bit of the particulars, Nakajima finally went still with the realization. “Sabotaged how? Like… hacked?”

  “No. Worse. A hacker would have been detected eventually, left traces. This is internal. Someone with serious access is selectively degrading performance. Not killing anything outright. Just choking it slowly. They’re working from within the company’s legacy algorithms that none of the wage slave engineers want to even touch.”

  He looked harder, devouring the data I’d brought up. Then he swore softly. “Motherfucker.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think?” he muttered. “Overall.”

  “I think someone’s taken the company’s pre-existing mild incompetence and weaponized it. They’ve got a high, high-level mole. A seriously skilled one. Possibly more than one, or at least one with a couple of helpers.” How else could this fuckery be happening at literally all hours of the day, every day? And I couldn’t even tell how many years ago it had started. It had just escalated in recent months.

  “A conspiracy. Great.” Nakajima sagged back in the chair with an overwhelmed-looking expression. “Yeah. That fucking tracks.”

  “How so?” I asked. “You get anything on your end?”

  “Oh I got plenty.” He held up all five fingers and began counting down. “One: morale is subterranean. Like, Mariana Trench.” I had no idea what that was. “People are scared of touching anything because if they break it, it’s their ass. Two: whole teams are blaming other teams, entire departments. Three: everyone hates the old CTO, no one is shocked he ‘resigned.’ Four: people really don’t trust the Taiwan HQ. Five: and this is the kicker—half the floor knows something weird has been happening with schedule rollbacks for months, but every time someone reported it…”

  He ran his finger across his throat like a knife. Real subtle, dude.

  [The Marianas trench is—]

  D: Not now, N.

  “Suppressed at best, usually buried or worse. Lots of demotions, people sometimes losing their jobs outright. I’ve also got a list of names of people who got ‘reassigned’ to a ‘special project’ that no one’s heard from since.”

  My eyes narrowed.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Tell me that isn’t what it sounds like.”

  “Oh yeah,” Nakajima said darkly. “It is. No one’s been able to prove anything, but I’d say it’s fuckin’ weird when a company loses almost a tenth of a percent of its HQ workforce to ‘suicides’ in less than three years. And these are sweet gigs, too, not black corp bullshit. My point is: they shouldn’t be killing themselves in these numbers. The wage slaves have picked up the hint: don’t dig too deep. So they stopped looking.”

  I chuckled under my breath. “This is so stereotypical, holy shit. A classic Night City corpo hit job.” Just a more competent one than usual.

  “Yeah,” Nakajima said, suddenly grinning. “Just another day in the world’s ugliest shithole.”

  I couldn’t help but meet his grin with my own. This was fun.

  “Alright,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “Let’s find the perp. Where do we start?”

  I nodded to the rotating wall to wall display of QianT’s systems overhead.

  “We dig into all of it until we find the bastard doing this. All of it, from everywhere all at once. And we aren’t stopping until we find the source.”

  Belatedly, I remembered I had some kind of TV appearance with Qiang later in the evening. Shit. But Nakajima just nodded, then leaned forward. “Let’s kill them.”

  “Metaphorically,” I said.

  [As if], Nannie giggled.

  000

  Half an hour later, I opened the terminal room’s door and blinked at the sudden exposure to real lighting.

  “Mr. Tsai.”

  “Yes, Mr. Martinez?” The old, impressively mustached man had been sitting in a chair outside the room this whole time, reading an actual, physical book. I stared for a moment. Wasn’t he supposed to be the acting CTO? Did he not have higher responsibilities than nannying us around for the day?

  …maybe not, come to think of it.

  Fuck it.

  “We need coffee.”

  The old man blinked. “There is a machine in the common area of this floor.”

  “Yeah, but,” I jerked my thumb back over my shoulder into the terminal room, at the wall to wall panel of screens. “I don’t want to waste my time walking over there, figuring out how to get it, getting it, and then coming back. Let alone having to answer anyone’s questions on the way to or from. I have level one Executive Master Access. I feel like that should come with perks. Namely, coffee service.” Not for me, of course, but I was dealing with a ‘fleshie’ that sorely needed his hits of caffeine.

  Amphetamines would make more sense at this point, but I hadn’t worked the guy to such an extent. Not yet at least.

  Nakajima immediately backed my play, hollering out from within the dark terminal room. “If this guy crashes, you wouldn’t even believe the consequences for your network, trust me. Just saying!”

  Tsai closed his eyes like he was painfully aware that we were, in fact, right.

  “Very well,” he sighed. “Any preferences?”

  Caffeine. And carbs. “All the milk and sugar in the world,” I said.

  He looked to Nakajima, who just shrugged, even as he was still sitting at his terminal. “What he said. I’m not much of a black drinker either.”

  “In fact, fuck it,” I said. “Find us some grub too.”

  Both of Tsai’s eyebrows were raised at this point, as he looked to Nakajima. Nakajima shook his head. “I’ll just take whatever’s lying around.”

  “I will see what can be done, gentlemen,” Tsai said primly.

  000

  I had not had high expectations. A few cups of coffee and some sandwiches at best.

  Instead, Tsai came back carrying an actual silver tray. My optics read the spectrometry on it, and, yep, the tray was made of literal, actual silver.

  And on top of the tray were three tall insulated mugs, a tiny silver carafe with what looked like real cream, and a little plate of sesame cookies.

  “Damn,” I muttered. “You went all out.”

  “QianT takes hospitality seriously,” he said formally. “And your work touches many lives.” Then, more dryly, he added: “Mine included, of course. I would prefer to remain employed by this company. Heaven’s forbid I start looking for a new job at my age.”

  Wasn’t much I could say to that, except feel a sense of skepticism that he hadn’t invested in a good pension plan despite his age and position. He set the tray of mugs and cookies down between us, on a side table between our terminals. Nakajima took a sip of it in the black and chuckled. “Oh, this is the good stuff.”

  “I persuaded the pantry staff to release the executive blend,” Tsai admitted. “I will be remaining outside. Whatever you need, just ask. I am at your disposal, gentlemen.”

  The door closed again. From his terminal, Nakajima raised his mug my way, chuckling. “I could get used to this.”

  000

  “This place needs… something,” Nakajima said.

  “What?” I asked, eyes glazing over as I took in twenty entire years of a Taiwanese commit log I’d found in an improperly deleted HQ archival dump. “I don’t even know where to get started on all the stuff this company needs.”

  A divine intervention, maybe. But then again, that’s what I was here for. Me and my one hundred million eddies to throw into the fire.

  …QianT was a mess, god damn. If V had been here, he would have already been taking heads. An entire stack of heads. Shame he hadn’t taken my offer.

  “I mean the room, boss” he said. “Like, vibe check, man. If I’m gonna be living here for the indefinite future, we need some better ambience. Feng Shui, you know.”

  I snorted. Nakajima wasn’t wrong. This terminal room was bare as hell. “Just find something that won’t give me cancer.”

  Over on his terminal, he started flicking through the room’s preset lighting settings.

  Southern sunset. Executive blue. Oceanic productivity. Energizing yellow.

  “Trash, trash, trash, total fuckin’ trash,” he muttered. “Ah.”

  He stopped on one: a faint low-light cityscape, like a stylized Night City skyline at night, with neon hints at the periphery. Not bad.

  A bedazzled starscape, on the ground instead of the sky. Nothing could beat that beautiful vista.

  [I approve], Nanny texted, not bothering to materialize her avatar. [Now it looks we’ve got a villain’s lair of our own].

  I chuckled quietly.

  At a certain point, I dragged over a side table to rest equidistant between me and Nakajima, and I stacked it with all of what was left of the coffee and cookies. Nakajima took off his outer layer of clothes and threw them into a loose pile on a spare chair like he owned the place, barely paying it any mind as he kept diving deeper into QianT’s systems.

  By the time Tsai returned to check on us, the room might have been starting to smell. He took it all in at a glance. How comfortable we’d made ourselves. He only chortled as he retrieved our various garbage and assembled it back on the tray. “Gentlemen. I see you’ve… made yourselves comfortable.”

  “This is what optimizing for productivity looks like,” I said. “I expect we’ll be at it for a while.”

  Tsai nodded. “Then I shall remain at your and Mr. Nakajima’s disposal, Mr. Martinez.”

  000

  I opened the door again an hour later, and there he still was. “Mr. Tsai.”

  He looked up from his book without even pausing. What was he even reading? “Yes, Mr. Martinez?” he said kindly.

  “We need food.”

  “I brought cookies.”

  “Food,” I repeated. “Like, actual food. Fats. Protein. Human fuel. Enough with the empty carbs, please.”

  [Wow, David. You are on a roll with these demands of yours!]

  D: This is how corpos talk. I just want to be taken seriously

  Tsai nodded without missing a beat. “In that case, I will be back soon, gentlemen.”

  000

  When the door slid open again, Tsai was pushing a small cart.

  The smell hit first: something citrusy and mildly salty, in a way I’d never encountered before in my life.

  Nakajima’s jaw dropped when he saw the logo on the cart’s cover. Some fancy-looking castle with three towers.

  “Is that—” he breathed, “is that La Croix?”

  I blinked. “The fizzy water?”

  “No, you ignorant animal,” he hissed. “La Croix, the restaurant! City Center, French raw seafood fusion, Siou?ais style, hottest restaurant in the district. I read a magazine that called it ‘the best in Night City.’”

  You read it from a magazine, huh? Guess it’s gotta be true.

  I didn’t say it, however, because truly, I could not fault that hype. Not from that smell, oh no. I was sold.

  Sold.

  Tsai took off the cover, and revealed an entire smorgasbord of seafood. Real seafood, which I’d never really seen before out of movies and BDs. My eyes were immediately drawn to a half a dozen grilled lobsters, weird bug-like things that smelled divine, arrayed around a tub of butter. It kept getting better from there.

  …A couple of bowls of some delicious-looking pink-white stew, a few steaks of various sea creatures resting atop plates of steaming vegetables, and most impressive of all, a long, chilled platter overflowing with precisely arranged raw seafood like Japanese sashimi, but somehow different. A dozen different fishes, tails and fillets and delicate pink slices of flesh and a choice of dipping sauces, all arranged in a spiral that looked like something that belonged more on a work of art than something you were actually supposed to… eat.

  “Holy fuck,” Nakajima muttered.

  I didn’t feel much different either.

  Tsai set the cover down carefully on the side table, then straightened his jacket. “La Croix,” he confirmed. “Yes. Ms. duBenalle considers QianT a valued partner. She was more than happy to let us tap what remained of her midday raw bar.”

  “Jaqueline duBenalle actually took your call?” Nakajima asked, genuinely awed. I, on the other hand, had no clue who this was.

  “She and I are quite friendly, actually,” Tsai said mildly. “Her grandchildren and mine go to the same elementary school.”

  I stared at the platters of delicious-looking food. Then I stared at Tsai. I put my hand on his shoulder, all thoughts of acting the hard-ass corpo gone. “You’re good people, Mr. Tsai.”

  I was no longer just sold on the food. Oh no.

  I was sold on him, too. Mr. Tsai was truly the best in the business at… whatever this was.

  Jesus, he’s just the CTO? No way!

  Nakajima was just staring over the cart of food in awe. “How much does this even cost? Just reserving a table there is like three months of my salary.” He hesitated, frowned. “Former salary.”

  From what I knew about his salary from the contract that I had Shanghai’d into this operation, then that table would cost a cool… fifteen thousand eddies.

  A lot less than what I had expected.

  The pay I got while riding with Maine’s Crew really had spoiled me, it seemed. Why didn’t everyone just become mercenaries?

  [Because not everyone has me. Or the Sandy. But most importantly, me.]

  D: Yeah, that tracks.

  Tsai chortled, actually chortled, and stroked his ridiculous mustache like he was Santa Claus. “Mr. Nakajima,” he said, entirely amused, “whatever money problems QianT has… they are of an entirely different order of magnitude than the cost of keeping the two of you happy and working on our most existential of problems. I am, myself, entirely unqualified to tackle this problem. I am a butler by training , in service to the Mei Jing family.”

  Shit!

  I had to ask. “Seriously?”

  “Very.” He inclined his head toward us, expression turning sincere. “If a few meals from La Croix improve your chances of untangling this catastrophe, then they are the cheapest investment this company has made all year. And providing this is certainly the best use of my time as an ‘acting CTO,’” he chuckled in a self-depracating way. “I sincerely wish you the best of luck with your forays into our deeper systems, gentlemen. Merely ask if you require anything else.”

  “That’s the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Nakajima whispered reverently. “Marry me.”

  I cackled at that.

  “I am spoken for,” Tsai replied, chortling good-naturedly. “And even if I were not, you cannot afford me.”

  He left us with the seafood.

  I took snapshots of it, in case Lucy wanted to see any of it—and in case it might make for a good place to go, too. La Croix, they said. Might make for a fun date.

  We tore into the food like starving animals. “Bro,” Nakajima said around a slice of something buttery and white, “I think this grub costs somewhere around fifteen thousand eddies. We have officially made it.”

  I hesitated in mild horror at that price estimate, thought about confirming, then decided I couldn’t be fucked to bother. I stabbed a piece of fish, dipped it in the sauce, and let it melt on my tongue. “We’re being treated to Night City’s best takeout in a locked corporate terminal suite while chasing a hypothetical mole in a hundred-billion eurodollar company,” I said. “Yeah. We made it. Let’s not fuck it up.”

  As we kept digging in, I considered his recent wording. Bro, specifically.

  I quite liked that. I didn’t view Nakajima as lesser to me. He was a friend. He’d given me a hand, and I was grateful to it beyond belief.

  I appreciated his familiarity.

  I took a moment to stop working the meat off the crab leg I was focusing on, and cleared my throat. Nakajima came to a start, straightening his back, chewing his food and swallowing at record speed.

  Not something I wanted.

  “Thank you, dude,” I said. “For everything. Let’s keep at this pace, alright? Work, work, and no bullshit. No corporate glazing. Real talk, alright?”

  His eyes widened at me. Then, they narrowed. “You’re fucking seventeen years old, and your bright idea was to bring a sysadmin like me to work on a corp as big as this one.”

  “Your point?”

  “We’re fucking retarded, David,” he said. “Let’s not pretend we aren’t.”

  I laughed. “Choom, I hate that description.”

  “Ah, then you gotta suck it. Cuz I take pride in it.”

  I giggled. Dickhead.

  “Retarded or not,” I said. “We’re doing this thing.”

  “Bro, you think I meant that shit negatively?!” he spat. “Guess how many speds are in charge of our data farms in Arasaka, David. You wouldn’t believe it. Trust me, bro. Retardation is an asset in this business. All you gotta do is make sure you don’t go full retard on the management.”

  Christ almighty.

  “But you and I? Let’s not pretend, David. We’re gonna do this, and we’re gonna be our own degenerate selves while we do it, alright? Full retards.”

  Oh god. What had I unleashed?

  000

  We settled into a rhythm.

  Nakajima took QianT Night City HQ, going over the personnel files, internal chat logs and disciplinary records as a start, then moving to old org charts, dissolved departments and failed projects and initiatives. Anything human-facing that had something, anything that smelled off.

  On a hunch, I took Taiwan HQ: At this point I was done looking at the low-level source code. I was going through employee rosters, current and former, looking for anything and everyone I suspected might have been tied to maintaining and updating the company’s various algorithms.

  At some point, Nakajima leaned back, rubbing his eyes.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got at least three red flags.”

  “Hit me.”

  “One: there was a ‘special projects’ office on the tenth floor that opened up two years ago, and got emptied three months ago. No one knows where they went. All their files got tagged for long-term cold storage. Two: the old CTO had an exceptionally large monthly discretionary spending budget which was consistently overdrawn, for each of the last five months before his ‘resignation.’ There are no receipts. They were all just… deleted. And three: there’s a middle manager systems engineer here in Night City named Josef Huerta who has survived half a dozen layoffs and staff reorganizations, and somehow managed to survive two budget cuts that took out his previous departments, without ever losing staff or funding.”

  “That just means he’s good at office politics,” I said.

  “Sure,” Nakajima said. “But he also happens to be positioned at the exact intersection between firmware scheduling and Taiwan-side approvals. He greenlights the firmware they send over. If someone wanted to sandbag us from inside HQ…”

  My eyes widened. A connection between the fuckery I could almost sense coming out of Taiwan HQ and the Night City ops. “He’d be the perfect guy.”

  “Yep,” he looked at me curiously. “You find anything?”

  I shook my head. On my end, the picture was far less actionable. “Still chasing this hunch. I’ve found some zombie accounts. Old employee login IDs that should’ve been disabled decades ago, but still have access—”

  “That’s normal in a big company,” he said immediately, then grimaced. “Sorry. Reflex.”

  “Yeah, it is,” I said, nodding. “But these particular ghost accounts all have something in common: I can’t tell if their activity logs are idle or not, because they were deleted months ago.”

  “Huh,” Nakajima whistled. “That’s weird. Find anything about them?”

  “Just that they only interact with algorithmic automation processes. It’d be nice if I could confirm that they interact specifically with the automation that handles firmware pushes and rollbacks, but like I said, the logs were deleted. All I can tell you is they don’t read mail, they don’t log in to normal consoles, they don’t follow normal employee working hours.”

  “And you still haven’t traced them?”

  “Oh, I traced them,” I said, chuckling. “To a dead department called ‘Automated Legacy Management’ that got dissolved eight years ago. Not a single actual face or current employee ID tag to be seen anywhere in this mess.”

  Something was bothering me about the zombie employee tags, but I still couldn’t find anything actionable. Therefore: it was time that I switch tacks to follow up on Nakajima’s lead.

  This Huerta fellow.

  000

  By the time Qiang texted me, the room had fully evolved into our man cave.

  Half a dozen empty coffee mugs sat in a line on the side table. The garbage can was filled with crumpled napkins and the ruined, inedible portions of the amazing seafood. We each had piles of unnecessary outerwear laying around, and we’d forgone our suits. As for the ambient cityscape lighting, it had dimmed to “late night neon,” tinted in faint purples. It was almost 8 pm now. Almost primetime for evening news.

  We’d even hijacked one of the smaller holo panels to quietly display a muted local news feed in the corner, because Nakajima claimed his brain needed “peripheral bullshit” to focus. Unsurprisingly, it was still all about the one-day Tsviet/gang war from a few days ago, and the still-growing death toll, which had now gone up past 1,200. They were still recovering bodies from that one housing block that had been erased by a swarm missile launcher.

  I wasn’t using QianT’s systems at this point. I’d switched over to using my NCPD-granted CCTV permissions through the Joint Task Force to follow up on Huerta’s movements. He had his own dedicated monitor, one that I patched through to my optics, for Nanny to constantly view.

  The disorientation of ‘learning’ via two different mental channels—my own, and Nanny’s—had been something of an unspoken learning curve in the past weeks that we had been spliced together. Now, I did it as easily as breathing.

  I reviewed the text.

  ‘It’s time, Martinez. Follow me to the roof.’

  I stood up. “Master’s calling,” I said drolly. “Qiang wants me on something.”

  “What is it?”

  “You watch the news?”

  “Who the fuck does?”

  “Tune in for this one, choom. Your boy’s about to make a name for himself,” I chuckled as I walked over to the exit. “Keep your eyes on Huerta.”

  I still needed to get to the bottom of this before going to sleep.

  [You’re going on about thirty six hours of no sleep now, David. You’d probably pull way ahead of this fleshie if you just slept.]

  Common sense told me to obey her. My sleep schedule had been nothing short of erratic for the past week, in-between all the partying, merc-work, real work, and more partying.

  Three months to insolvency told me that I wasn’t working nearly as tirelessly as I should.

  So much to do.

  Latest in the backlog: Punishment Party Part 3